


skin deep, snow cold

by BathosBardess



Category: Frozen (2013), Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Anorexia, Asshole!Elsa, Bulimia, Clueless!Jack, Elsa is a supermodel, F/M, Fashion AU, Hospitals, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Jack is the makeup artist, Jelsa - Freeform, Medical Terminology, No Smut, character gets seriously injured, ends in fluff i swear, i should tag that in, i'm v v sorry, idk man idk, listen a character's last name is literally two GoT references you get me, lots of literary quotes because 17 yo me was pretentious af, near death mention, some dream!gore, the character is a dog, this was written in 2014 it was a different world okay, what is this unbeta-d nonsense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 07:04:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9424544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BathosBardess/pseuds/BathosBardess
Summary: She looked beautiful because many, Jack amongst them, had moulded her into something to look upon. She looked beautiful because of the linen and wool and fleece, the shine in her hair, the shimmer around her eyes and under her cheekbones and the cerise of her mouth.Jack felt like he had never created something so ugly.





	1. Part 1: On Colours, Ice, and Bony Shoulders

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Pretty Things](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/70722) by SaturnXK. 



> So.
> 
> This is on ff.net under my old pen-name Kopai. I present it in all its unbeta-d glory.
> 
>  
> 
> It is inspired by "Pretty Things" by saturnxk.

* * *

 

_'Love of beauty is taste. Creation of beauty is art.'_

_Ralph Waldo Emerson_

 

* * *

 

 The first time she slid into the chair, they were at Istanbul, and the theme was androgyny.

He wasn't even a real make-up artist; he was one's PA, and his boss had thought it prudent to put his art skills to test on real models with real faces.

He had only worked for two months before Istanbul, and only on the younger models, the ones in the lines, the ones who weren't supposed to catch anyone's eye. That job had been simple: make the pretty things plain, uniform, ordinary. Make them skinny, make them dull; make them drab washes of customary beige, pale pink and sandy brown.

In Istanbul he found himself thrust into the world of the big names, the supermodels and showstoppers.

And he had looked away for a second, only to turn back and find one of them in his chair.

_Make these ones pretty_. That was his boss's one order.

_These ones_ were the pushers, the professionals, the showstoppers, the supermodels. _These ones_ were the crème de la crème, the best of the coat-hangers, the bodies they designed for.

For, Jack had learnt quickly, they designed chiefly for concave stomachs and razor sharp clavicles, for small mouths and dry hair, for the stench of stomach acids and the scent of expensive volatile potions.

They designed for beauty that had faded under pressure, for allure mantled in three coats of sticky, oily paint.

Jack hated the world he had entered. He couldn't leave either; he had put far too much at stake.

Presently, with Elsa Arryn-Dalla in his chair, he wondered, briefly, if it had been worth it, just a little.

She was beautiful from where he stood, three feet away. Her hair was platinum blonde, so pale it was almost white ( _not as pale as his own, oh no_ ), but the shade of young wheat in the shadows. The thick mane was held away from her face with a deep blue hair band, which brought out the deep sapphire blue of her eyes.

Only when he got closer did he see the greenish-blue circles around her eyes, the yellow tinge on the ridges of her cheeks, the cracks on her lips, the petulant pout of her mouth that seemed to pinch her face into something as ugly as the expensive clothing on her being.

"Excellent, a newbie," she muttered, sarcasm dripping like venom. Her voice was the husky ( _no, broken, her voice is broken_ ) draft he would've expected from somebody's diabetic grandmother. "Do you even _know_ what to do?"

"Of course, Ma'am." He tried to sound bright, cheerful. In this world of gel nails and broken extensions, he tried ( _so hard_ ) to be just a little ray of sunshine.

He looked through the sheaf of sketches he had been handed, plucking out the pale one marked _EAD_.

A mask of pale foundation. Vigorous erasing of the dark circles. Quick cover-up of all things yellow. Sand. Burnt sienna. Bark. Plums. Cherries. Night.

He worked against a background score of curses and dark swears, of the rustling of tweed and cashmere, of the hiss of hairspray and the drone of dryers.

When she opened her mouth for the lip liner, he felt the reek of burning tobacco dancing with the sharp assault of peppermint hit his nostrils, alongside the undertone of vomit. He tried to divert his senses to the fragrance of the eye shadow powder, to the earthy tones of the concealer, the fruity scent of the layer of lip balm he had been forced to slather on. Instead, he hid her flaws under the cacophony of all of them; he breathed them all in till he forgot to register them.

When he was done, he moved back, dropping his angle brush unceremoniously into the holder. He looked at the cheeks he had plumped, the eyes he had minimized by mere illusion, the small red pout.

"Do I look manly enough?" Elsa asked him quite civilly, quite bored. He nodded dutifully.

"There's this one thing…" he muttered remembering. He brought out the small case, and Elsa Arryn-Dalla skillfully popped in the brown contact lenses.

She nodded once at the mirror before stalking off to the hairdressers. Jack heard her mutter, "Hypocrites, the whole lot of them."

 

* * *

 

Jack watched her walk from the middling seats reserved for the backstage staff. She walked the last walk, a graceful, slender woman dressed in dreadful brown and cream; her hair slicked back and pulled into a neat bun. The theme was androgyny, yet they had manipulated her into looking decidedly feminine.

_Hypocrites, the whole lot of them_.

She looked beautiful, perhaps, to the photographers, the magazine editors, the rich patrons and the world in general.

She looked beautiful because many, Jack amongst them, had moulded her into something to look upon. She looked beautiful because of the linen and wool and fleece, the shine in her hair, the shimmer around her eyes and under her cheekbones and the cerise of her mouth.

Jack felt like he had never created something so ugly.

 

* * *

 

The second time he painted her face, they were in Tokyo. This time the theme was brighter; more pink and sunshine yellow and grass green and sky blue.

He was finishing a final curl on Aurora's lashes when a deep voice ( _no longer broken, thank God_ ) interrupted him.

"I don't have all day, you know."

He didn't even look up. Aurora opened her strawberry lips to voice a customary insult, washing him in the unmistakable tang of half-digested food ( _do me a favour and get a mint_ ) and the caustic stench of alcohol. She didn't say anything, however, shutting her tiny mouth with a _clack_ of small whitened teeth.

"I'm sure I don't have to wait very long for you, _Aurora_." Elsa sneered; her voice was ice and steel blades. "Is this your last show, sweetie?"

Aurora stiffened. Her PA, who was sitting at Jack's elbow, visibly shuddered.

The blonde stood up stiffly and strutted off, swaying slightly, her ankles held in place by the straps of her heels. Her PA hurried after her, voicing a concern, only to be rewarded with a hard shove on her sternum.

Elsa, now seated, snorted. " _Respect your seniors,_ they said. _Your seniors may be winos too thick to form a sentence,_ they never said."

He didn't have to look at the sketch this time.

Elsa didn't keep quiet this time.

"This show is fucking ridiculous," she muttered, only half angry, as Jack gently blended in the pale concealer. "It's _September_ , and here I am dressed like a fucking _daisy_."

Jack looked at her eyes as he covered up her forehead and the bit between her dark eyebrows. Her eyes were the colour of sapphires, but with none of the fire, none of the sparkle, none of the _life_. Her irises were as good as two chips of food-dyed ice, the sort his little sister used to put in her lemonade to give it a hue similar to the deep lakes she had been fond of painting.

Her eyes were as lifeless, as dull, as uninteresting as those painted pools of water, as those whimsical frozen pieces of his childhood.

He melded her cheekbones into her face, removing the sharpness, bringing out the roundness of her chin.

She kept staring at her reflection in the mirror behind him, watching him turn her into a softer, sweeter person.

"You're good at this," she commented. "How long have you been working?"

"Two and a half months." He used the very tips of his fingers to dab a darker shade of beige into the hollows of her cheeks. "I'm not actually a make-up artist, Toothiana's only taught me a little so I could help out."

"Toothiana has an eye for talent, I see."

"Thank you, Miss Dalla."

She snatched his wrist out of the air before he could brush in the blush. "Either you call me Miss _Arryn-Dalla_ or you call me Elsa." There was ice in her tone, but no steel. "I'm _not_ just Elsa Dalla, understand?"

Jack nodded. He was used to models having sudden outbursts of passion.

Elsa's fingers were thinner than Popsicle sticks, but strong enough to bruise his pale skin.

She dropped his hand and gestured for him to resume changing her face into something that wasn't her own.

He worked silently. Beige. Black. Mascara. Curlers. Strawberry. Rose. Scarlet. Sunshine. Buttercup. Tangerine. Gold.

Her mouth still smelled the same: vomit, cigarettes, mint and scorn.

 

* * *

 

He didn't watch her walk that night. He stayed behind backstage to help manage the scraps of silk and feathered cloths and sequined bolts lying about, tossed away at the last minute. Toothiana tossed him a bottle of make-up remover and left him in charge of the returning models.

Jack hated the removing part.

He didn't hate it because the models threw tantrums about if he was using the right brand of remover ( _it's just alcohol and moisturizer, for fuck's sake_ ), or if it was suited for their skin ( _sorry, lass, but when you break out, it'll still be my job to cover up_ ), or if they disliked the smell.

He didn't mind ( _not all that much_ ) when Rapunzel plucked the sodden wad of cottonwool out of his hand and tossed it at his face, or when Cindy screamed bloody murder because the solution stung her face. He wiped off the cottonwool with one sweep of his hand, and the ringing in his ears was only temporary.

No, he hated it because with each sweep of his fingers, he took off some pigment and cream, and off with them came some of the artificiality that bathed the men and women he worked on. The cotton pads would gather streaks of creamy brown and red gloss and yellow glitter, and the face and neck and shoulders would lose a cover or two, exposing humanity in a cruel combination of stinging and stickiness.

_Sweep_ , and there was a laugh line. _Sweep_ , and there was a tiny black mole. _Sweep_ , and there were the scars from an early breakout of acne.

_Sweep,_ and there was work undone; careful work that had ensured these people looked anything, _anything_ , but humane.

These men and women were blank canvases and empty dressmaker's dollies, pretty things for designers to play with, for choreographers to walk down runways; they were the real-life Barbies and Kens, plastic with movable limbs, pretty things with ribbons in their hair and red on their lips, wrapped in satin and fleece.

But with each flaw they became pretty things with heartbeats and hopes and imaginations, and Jackson Frost did not think he could handle understanding that humanity, especially when his chief source of income was hiding it.

 

* * *

 


	2. Part Two: On Hangovers, Christmas and Cake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning, a lot of implied eating disorders mentioned.
> 
> Also, fluff.

* * *

 

 

_'It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.'_

_Leo Tolstoy_

 

* * *

 

 

December, his name tag changed from _Jackson Frost, PA_ to _Jackson Frost, Make-Up_.

He knew it was December because he was in Prague, and snow covered everything, and he knew it was Christmas Eve because Katie called him to sing a carol softly into the mouthpiece of her new cellphone, and to tell him that she'd started college that September ( _the September Elsa had been dressed as a daisy, with sunrise on her eyelids and snow in her heart_ ), that their mother missed him and hoped he was looking after himself.

Christmas evening was the first time he was singled out by a model to do her make-up, and it was Elsa Arryn-Dalla who did so.

She barreled out of a group of waif-like women to grab at his shoulder, pushing him out of Rapunzel's way.

"You," she snarled. "I was looking for you."

She was wearing a confection of cloth-of-gold and spirals of hard silver plastic, slashed here and there with red silk. She looked like an elf out of his childhood books, if an elf had no flesh and a poorly concealed beginning of a zit.

Jack let her sit down as courteously as was possible for a man who had spent most of the previous night awake. As he organized his palettes, she flipped out a cigarette.

"This is a No Smoki—"

"Relax, Grandpa, I'm not lighting it," she breezed. She flipped the paper and tobacco stick in her fingers, watching it weave in and out of bones and skin and vamp red polish.

Jack began working in silence, letting silver melt into purple melt into red melt into black. Under his fingers, Elsa went from an elf to an evil queen out of a fairy tale, with scarlet lips and high cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass ( _would that they cut through the ice as well_ ).

Under his fingers, Elsa also swayed slightly, breathing out alcohol and acid, rendering the evil queen a tipsy aristocrat.

"Christmas party?" he asked conversationally, glazing her cheeks with gold.

She snorted, and some of the powder flew out of the angle brush. "Yeah, right. Christmas party for the Ice Queen, yay."

Jack fought back a troubled frown. "Yeah, I had a lonely Christmas too."

He'd had dinner with Toothiana and Sandy, but she didn't need to know that.

"Lonely?" Her voice was a whiplash. "I wasn't _lonely_. I was surrounded, absolutely _surrounded_ by lovely people who were merry through the night…"

Her eyes closed as her voice trailed off, and Jack didn't know if she was falling asleep or passing out. He caught her head as it dropped ( _but carefully, and only at the temples, all that work couldn't be smudged_ ) and gently eased it backwards. Her eyes opened into two blue slits and she gazed at him groggily.

"I didn't catch your name." Her mouth stretched into the shade of a flirtatious smirk.

Jack eased her eyes shut with his fingertips as he began curling the lashes. "Jackson Frost. You can call me Jack."

She smiled, half-tired, half-drunk. "Elsa Arryn-Dalla. You can call me Elsa."

"I know, ma'am."

"Tch, tch." She sat up, wincing; even through the layers of cosmetics, Jack could see a vein bulging on her temple. "I said _Elsa_ , not _Ma'am_."

"Well, _Elsa_ , you have a show in fifteen minutes and I haven't even done your mascara yet."

"Pfft. Mascara." Her cigarette slipped out of her fingers; she ignored it. "Mascara and talc and eyeliner and shadow and lip gloss. They're like…icing. I hate icing. I like chocolate, though."

_She's really, really drunk. Or high._ Jack didn't even want to know which.

"Elsa, do you think you can walk today?" he asked cautiously.

"Yeah, yeah." She waved a satin gloved hand at him. "I'm just hungover."

"You're still drunk," he pointed out. "What have you eaten since morning?"

She chewed the inside of her cheek. "I…don't remember."

"Elsa, I'm serious. What did you eat for breakfast?"

Her eyes glazed over. "I think it was an apple."

" _An_ apple?"

"Yeah."

Jack wanted to argue about the benefits of a healthy breakfast. He wanted to point out that it was only his skills that made her look even faintly alive just then, that sans make-up she looked like a fresh corpse, and smelled of tobacco and vodka and vinegar. He wanted to yell at her to get her shit together, to realize that she wasn't even a skeleton anymore, just a walking stretch of skin stretched over a few misshapen bones.

Instead, he shook his head, straightened her in her seat, and slathered the sticky black fluid onto her eyelashes.

 

* * *

 

Toothiana let him off removal duty.

He cleaned up his station quickly, carefully stacking the palettes and powder cases, making sure the brushes' hairs were as clean as dry air could get them.

He was watching one of the younger models ( _Veronica?_ ) rip off the feather boa almost drowning her tiny frame while screaming at her PA to get her _actual, real clothes, for God's sake_.

Something blunt and cold brushed his elbow. Jack looked down into Elsa's black-lensed eyes. This time they looked like obsidian, a dull gleam in their depths.

"There's a party," she whispered, trying ( _so hard_ ) to sound seductive. "I want you to be my plus-one."

She was still slurring her words. "Did you manage to walk?"

She laughed, a cold, mirthless gunshot of a sound. "I walked a'right, don't know how many noticed. Fifth from the last walk tonight."

She had changed into a simple black skater dress, its full skirt hiding the inward curve of her midriff. She looked like a ghost in the white-yellow lights of the make-up stations, porcelain skin and shadowed eyes.

_I'll going to a party with the ghost of anorexia past._ It didn't make much sense, but Jack laughed anyway, because he hadn't seen daylight in a week, it was Christmas and a beautiful girl had just asked him out.

 

* * *

 

They never made it to the party.

Elsa passed out in the car, toppling backwards in her seat in an angle that worried him. Her legs were long white sticks of plastic in the gloom, her midriff no thicker than his wrist. Her back arched backwards over the headrest, threatening to snap in half.

Jack pulled her head to rest against the side of his thigh, alabaster skin and buttercream locks stark against the black of trousers. He had the driver drive to his hotel instead, and Prague rushed by them, snow and lights and vehicle smoke mingling with the mint and lavender from her hair and the plumes of glitter from his shirt.

He half-dragged Elsa up to his room, garnering him a few odd looks along the way.

He laughed to himself. Jackson Frost, PA, was dragging Elsa Arryn-Dalla, sought after model, worldwide beauty, into his one room hotel suite ( _bed TV dresser desk, bathroom with a tub_ ).

He dropped her unceremoniously on his bed. She barely weighed anything; Katie had been heavier the day he'd left for college, and she had been only eleven.

Elsa stirred slightly, opening her eyes. "This isn't…a party," she mumbled.

"No," Jack replied, prying off his shoes. "It's my hotel room. You passed out, I didn't know where else to go."

She attempted a smirk, a lazy pull of the corners of her lips; Jack noted just how wide her mouth was when it wasn't pursed in a professional pout. "Tryin' to get lucky, eh?"

Jack laughed. He'd laughed more today than the last six months. "Can't get lucky with a skin of bones."

She nudged his side weakly with the toe of her pumps, an indignant snort escaping her nose. "Take these off, please?"

Jack pulled off the vinyl horrors, a size too small for her feet. Her toenails were painted pearly white, glimpses of yellow in the streaks.

He could count the bones of her feet through her skin, and the veins were stark green, snaking up like the branches of a tree as slender as she was.

"Well, Jackson, it's Christmas," she said unexpectedly. "And here we are, two lonely souls—"

"Two doesn't make lonely," he smiled.

"Two makes lonely if one is me."

He shook his head. "That doesn't make any sense."

"Forgive me, oh Lord Frost." She dragged herself backwards, then clawed her way up the headboard till she was more sitting than lying. "This one is still a little drunk."

Jack frowned. "How much did you drink, at six in the evening?"

She shrugged. "Enough."

They sat in silence awhile, Jack looking at his hands, Elsa twiddling her toes.

"I'm hungry," he announced. "You?"

"I'm always hungry," she replied. "That, or not hungry at all. No in-between." She looked around the room. "That reminds me, you got a smoke?"

"I don't smoke." He pried his feet back into his shoes. "I'll see if the bakery's open."

"You want cake _now_?"

"Hey." He smirked. "It's Christmas."

 

* * *

 

Half an hour later, he found her asleep, sprawled across the queen-sized bed on her stomach, snoring lightly.

The thought of her ribs collapsing under gravity alarmed him for a fraction of a second.

All she ever did was drink, smoke and sleep, he realized; those were her means to achieving ultimate beauty, to be a fairy, an elf, a waif, vulnerable and weak and skeletal, perfectly smooth and perfectly thin enough to be moulded into the fancies of the rich and the artsy.

She needed the sleep most, but she did it less. Their lives were aeroplanes and runways, the gloom of the cabin by day and the sparkle of the shows and laser lights of the parties by night. Once Jack had gone thirty-six hours without glimpsing the night sky; another time he had not known morning for two days. Back and forth, back and forth, around the globe and back; from the lands of always summer to bleak winter to spring over one week, and no one batted an eye.

"Jackson?" She opened an eye almost painfully. "Did you get your cake?"

"I did, and I got yours too." He pulled out the box with its simple chocolate sponge cake, adorned with nothing but glace cherries. She hated icing.

She scrambled up, her hair standing on its end, a shimmering silver-gold halo behind one half of her head. "I – I don't think so—"

Jack was already slicing the cake in half. "You've eaten one apple since morning."

"That's actually quite enough."

He ripped off the lid of the box and handed her half of the cake in its remnants. She looked at him, the box, the plastic spoon, and sighed.

"I'll try," she whispered, cutting off the tiniest bit.

Jack watched her swallow it, wincing slightly ( _does your throat hurt because of the acid burns, your majesty?_ ), then cut another slice. Only then did he proceed to wolf down his portion.

"So, Jack," she started conversationally. "Do you have a girlfriend?"

He snorted. "I've slept with exactly three girls, and none in the last year."

"And why is that?"

_Because the women I spend my days around now aren't_ women _, they're Barbies and Bratz and Polly Pockets, and their limbs hurt just as much as their plastic counterparts'._

"No reason." She was halfway through her portion, eating a little faster. "What about you? Girlfriend, boyfriend?"

"Fucks," she said harshly. "That's all I am to the other models, and that's all they are to me."

His lack of reaction surprised him. If any girl had said so to him when he was fresh-faced and twenty-one, he would've been scandalized.

"What about family?"

Some sadness crept into her eyes. _Finally, emotion_.

"Orphan," she stated. "They died when I was in high school. I had to raise Anna. That's my little sister."

_Anna_. A pretty name, and short, with none of the feigned regality _Elsa_ brought to the table. The face he conjured in his mind was round and full, with a wide smile laced with a little sadness, white-blond hair in two pigtails.

"Where is your sister now?" he asked cautiously. "Is she an actress or model or—?"

Her lips curled ever so little. "No, she's a kindergarten teacher."

Jack almost laughed before the cruelty of it registered. Elsa had begun modeling aged eighteen, which meant she never went to college, and evidence pointed towards it being so in order to support her sister, this mostly faceless entity of mist called _Anna_.

Only a quarter of her half of cake remained. "Now tell me about your family."

He shrugged. "Single mom, she was an accountant, runs her own shop now. I have a sister too, Katie, she started college this year." An unremarkable verbal history, the tale of thousands of children worldwide.

She nodded. "That's really normal. For you, anyway."

He didn't know what she was implying. "I'm sorry?"

"If you're so normal, why are you here?" She gestured around the room; Jack knew she meant Prague, with its headlights and billboards and smoke and snow. "You should be teaching art somewhere, or painting walls, or designing furniture, or whatever it is that art graduates do." Her arm dropped like it hurt her to hold it up. "Why are you _here_? Why are you putting sugared cherries on _our_ cakes, trying to make us more delectable than we are?"

Jack bit his lip. _Because I wanted to see beauty, and when I did, I wanted to create some more_.

"Why are you?" he countered. "You earn more in a week than I do in a year, you can leave any time; why are you still here, when you hate this life you lead?"

She looked away, her features setting themselves into ice and stone. "It's all I've ever done, Jack, it's all I know."

"So, no secret hobbies, hidden talents, whatever?" _Does nothing make you completely human, just a lost orphan girl in the crowd? Have you never held a paintbrush, or picked up a pen?_

She didn't deign to reply. She excused herself silently, padding to the bathroom, a stick of white clad in night.

Jack leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, wishing he could close his ears against the retching sounds echoing through the room.

 

* * *

 

She stayed the night, taking the chair, curling up in it like a cat, all bony limbs and braided tail. When dawn came she made a call from the room's phone, and before the sun was all the way up, she was gone.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on tumblr at bathosbardess !


	3. Part Three: On Snow,a Dog and Colouring Pencils

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look I wrote this at the height of summer so there's a lot of snow being mentioned, also me being salty about Indian summers.
> 
> Pet death mention in this chapter.

* * *

 

 

_'Clouds come floating into my life,_

_No longer to carry rain or usher storm,_

_But to add colour to my sunset sky.'_

_Rabindranath Tagore_

 

* * *

 

 

He was in Mumbai in July, and the backstage was sweltering. His snowy hair was slathered across his forehead, held in place by a sheen of sweat.

He was working on Jasmine, struggling with the liquid foundation, which rolled down her cheeks instead of remaining spotted. He had to brush plain talcum powder across her face to prevent a complete meltdown.

Toothiana materialized at his elbow. "Jack, I need to talk to you."

"In a minute, Tooth."

" _Now_."

"Then talk to me now," he muttered angrily. The heat, the humidity, and the excessive sparkle in the models' clothes were getting to him.

Toothiana huffed. "Fine. Elsa Arryn-Dalla wants you."

He looked up, craned his neck, and searched the crowd. "I didn't know she was here tonight. She'll have to wait, Jasmine here's the showstopper." He picked up one of the mascara tubes.

"No, no. She wants _you_. She wants to hire you as her personal artist."

Jasmine's eyebrows shot up, widening her eyes. _Yes, stay that way_ , Jack wanted to tell her. "I'm employed by you, Tooth."

"Is what I told her." Toothiana ran her fingers through her hair, the golden streak usually in front standing on its end near her crown. "She's persistent."

"Then quote me," he snapped. " _I don't want to be employed by her_. There."

One of Jasmine's eyebrows descended. _You sure you want to do that, bub?_

"Close your eyes, please," he said, his tone the coldest thing in the room. Sapphire. Silver. Gold. Night. Burgundy, cerise, shimmer. Around him, jewellery _clinked_ and jingled, _saris_ crackled as they were wrapped, PA's whimpered and a hair dryer groaned. "You're done, ma'am."

Jasmine glanced at her newly distorted self in the mirror. "Can I call you an idiot, Frost?"

"I believe you did so eleven times the first time I worked with you, ma'am," he replied, trying to sound sarcastic. He only sounded tired to the bone.

Jasmine adjusted the cloth draped over her shoulder. "Here's the twelfth, then. You're an idiot, Jack Frost. Arryn-Dalla wants to hire you, you don't just say no. Arryn-Dalla hates the word _no_."

"Thank you for the advice, ma'am. There are people waiting behind you."

Jasmine shot him a look too tired to be exasperated, clutching at the voluminous skirt that threatened to overwhelm her lower body. The studio lights caught the hundreds of little mirrors sewn into its hem, flashing at his eyes and quickening his irritation.

"She's right," Toothiana shrugged as the dusky woman sashayed away. "Elsa hates being denied anything."

"I didn't say I'll never work on her again, Tooth. I don't want to work _for_ her."

"Is this about Christmas?" Tooth's eyes were a dark blue, borderline purple, and he knew they had the tiniest sparkle in them right now. _You nearly got lucky with Elsa God-fucked Arryn-Dalla, and you brought her_ cake _? You, Jackson Frost, are an idiot._

It was so warm even remembering her words made him want to scream.

So Jack ignored her. Tiana was in the seat now, curtained in sparkles and silver and pink, hair straightened out into black ribbons, looking for all the world like an abomination. He sighed softly, to himself, preparing to emblazon her in gold and bronze, gazing ruefully at the girls lovely cheekbones before softening them into the rest of her face.

Whenever did these figurines start turning human in a swirl of silken skirts, he wondered.

 

* * *

 

In Florence that August, she was the first to slide into his seat. "I hear you don't want to work for me."

The bags under her eyes were smaller, and he noticed a very light smattering of freckles that he could have sworn weren't there before.

"I hear you don't want to work with me," she started, cold as her hands.

"I like working for Tooth," he replied. She was neat in a rich, furry mantle, the midriff slashed open, the skirt simply tiers of tulle. The theme was the fashionistas of the '90s, and they had gone all the way to draw the same.

"And I like working for Gucci." She rolled her eyes, and he nearly slipped the eyeliner across her temples. "Face it, Jack, you're miserable."

He let go of a hollow laugh. "I'm not miserable because of _Tooth_." He swept the sorrel pencil into a small wing. "I'm miserable because I spend days and nights prettifying terrible people." _Odd, that's why I started in the first place_.

"Then quit."

"Easy for you to say. You don't even keep down chocolate cake."

Her jaw shifted. "Those two things aren't related."

"Of course not. Close your eyes, please."

 

* * *

 

Elsa followed him to his hotel room that night. She wasn't the least bit drunk.

"You can't persuade me to work for you this way," he laughed. "My answer's still no."

She shrugged, falling backwards onto his bed, like those months ago in Prague. "Maybe I just want a place to sleep, Jackson, ever thought of that?"

All they really did was sleep, in the end, tired out by their argument; she curled up into a foetal position at one edge of the bed, threatening to fall off, and Jack spread himself over the other, one long pale arm dangling.

He woke up to his head nestled on her stomach, her fingers running through his hair. She picked up each strand and let it fall, then swept her hand through, watching the rows fall into place. Jack could see his blue-grey eyes reflected in hers. Her fingertips were cold; perhaps her veins really did channel cold water.

"Your hair's not dyed," she whispered, twisting a bunch. It hurt, but just a little. "Why is it so white?"

"It grows brown sometimes. One hair, or two. I pull them out."

She studied his scalp with clinical curiosity, her nails scraping softly. It was almost soothing, and he felt his eyes droop slightly. "Is it a disease of some sort?"

"Nah." He entwined his own hand into hers, fingers and snowy hair entangled, all so _so_ pale. "I had an accident while ice-skating. Took me months to recover. My hair…it just turned white, like an old man's. Never completely grew out brown again."

"I like it." She shifted so she could bury her small, fragile face into his temple. "It looks like winter."

"It was snowing in Prague." _You had more vodka than water in your system, and we both smelled of cosmetics and smoke and gasoline._

"I remember. Your window was all frosted over in the morning." She frowned, her skin crinkling like vellum. "I don't actually remember that show at all."

_You were fifth from the last walk, piss drunk and bone tired. You looked like an evil queen, the kind that always turned out to be a sorceress with a heart of gold. Only you were wearing the gold, and there was only ice in your heart._

 

* * *

 

From Florence he landed in Budapest, and she ended up somewhere in Brazil.

He wasn't Toothiana's employee any more when he reached Paris. He was a colleague.

She was in Paris in a floaty blue dress with silver scales down the front and rhinestones on the train. He did her make-up, moonlight and plums and oceans and ice tipped with crimson and rose.

She didn't talk. She only shifted the skirt about, fingering the train, tracing the scales. She seemed a little in awe of her outfit.

"It brings out the colour of your eyes, my lady," Jack supplied with a smile as he deepened her eyebrows.

Her fist clenched around a particularly large rhinestone; her facial muscles seemed to solidify. "Do your job, Frost," she gritted out.

Jack wanted to stop doing exactly that and ask her what was wrong. Only that made him feel like they were _friends_ , and he didn't know if he wanted to be friends with this woman with her dead eyes and deader hair that felt like the threads of an unraveled satin ribbon, whose voice sounded like an alcoholic's one December but a chain smoker's in July, and like autumn leaves in the early morning.

He held his tongue, working carefully, trying to make her face glow.

She was glowering, a twig-like little stormcloud hailing a blizzard. She was moving her jaw, and Jack could hear the uncomfortable dissonance of enamel grazing enamel.

"Please stop that," he half-snapped, holding a crimson-coated brush an inch from her mouth. "I _am_ trying to do my job."

Her mouth stretched into a snarl that was almost petulant. She looked like she was on the verge of slapping him.

_Go on, hit me. Hit me if that doesn't snap your fingers in half_.

For five seconds there was silence between the two, punctuated only by her rapid, shallow breathes and the _clack_ of a straightening iron behind them.

Her jaw stopped shifting as she turned her eyes away from his. Her ice-chip eyes gleamed, only for a second. "Please, Frost," she whispered. "Just…finish up, I have to have my hair done."

"Don't want to talk about it?" he asked, concern creeping into the coldness he attempted. "Open your eyes wide and look at the ceiling, please."

"I would, but I won't," she replied, her voice gaining some strength.

"Then don't." Silver seemed to melt into her skin, the alabaster foundation only sucking it in. He'd have to use the silver-blue, then. But silver-blue would only highlight the death in her irises, and people couldn't have that. Paris's fashion aristocracy wanted to see a living doll draped in ice, not a snow zombie from the pits of the North Pole.

"My dog died," she blurted.

Jack nearly dropped the palette in his hand. "I'm sorry, what?"

"My…my dog died." Tears were welling up, making her eyes twinkle and threatening to ruin his hard work. "Mar—Marshmallow, he swallowed something—he died this morning, and I don't— don't know how to—"

She blinked, trying to hold the droplets in ( _thank God for waterproof mascara_ ), shaking her head slightly. The motion loosened some of her shorter bangs from her headband, so white gold stuck to her forehead, embedding in some still-wet concealer.

Jack took a step back, trying to get further away from the hiccupping mess of a girl before him as she desperately dabbed at her eyes with a blue-stained cotton pad. She wasn't the supermodel just then, she was a girl in her twenties in a borderline ridiculous costume, breaking down over the news of a deceased pet. She wasn't cold pliable plastic anymore, she was skin and bones and blood and tears and shaking with sobs that she must have hoarded inside herself with the meticulosity of a dragon with gold.

She was a person, a woman, a bag of bones with actual feelings like love and grief, a working brain, a live _Homo sapiens sapiens_ , a human being.

Something that felt like the bottom end of an angle brush poked in the back. "Do something," Toothiana hissed.

He took a step forward, then another. He was holding himself back from any form of human contact with her, which was ridiculous. Florence was only a month and a half back; sometimes he'd wake up in another city with the ghost of her fingertips on his scalp.

She looked up at him, her face paint completely ruined, some purple smeared over the bridge of her nose and up to her forehead.

He had to smile. "I'd hug you, Elsa, but I'm wearing a new shirt."

Her lip quivered, and Jack was half-afraid it would drip to the floor like spilled jelly. She nodded, mouthed an "Excuse me" and left for the washroom, the rhinestones on her train hitting the chairs and legs with little clinks.

"I think you should follow her," Toothiana whispered.

"What, to the ladies' room?" He gestured one of the younger models to the now empty chair. "She'll be okay."

 

* * *

 

Elsa walked the ramp with the composure only a woman of her professionalism could muster. As Jack watched her swirl around, the train sweeping a wide arc on the polished wood, he saw the gleam gone from her eyes again. The fire was out, because on the runway she wasn't Elsa-whose-dog-died, she was Elsa Arryn-Dalla, Supermodel and Snow Queen, seventh from the last walk.

 

* * *

 

"So…you and Elsa got anything going?"

Jack stopped his fingers to glare at Belle. "No, ma'am."

She perked a skeptical eyebrow, looking ridiculous because he had only removed the colour on her left eye.

"We honestly have nothing going," he insisted. _She likes my hotel rooms, is all._

Belle opened her mouth, but was interrupted by a slight commotion when all of Rapunzel's beautiful golden hair slid off her head and to the floor in a graceful shower of sunlight.

Merida whistled. "Not so golden ar' ya, eh, princess?"

Rapunzel turned very red, stamped her foot, and walked off, her PA scampering after her, clutching the wig that had covered her employer's short brown hair.

_Not so golden ar' ya, eh, princess?_ Jack had a queer feeling those words were going to haunt him for days.

At least he'd come away with a great story. _The other day, I saw Rapunzel Corona's wig fall off, and her hair is as drab as mine_.

_'I like it. It reminds me of winter.'_

He shook his head and moved back to swiping Belle's cheeks with the smelly blue mixture. "Elsa and I are definitely not a thing," he told her again.

 

* * *

 

Night found him at the door of his room, and Elsa before him, clutching a small overnight bag.

"Why?" he groaned.

" _Why am I here_ or _why can't I just move in with you_?" she smirked.

"Why won't you leave me alone." He was too tired to let his tone lift at the ends of the question, rendering it a flat statement.

Flat statements were really all that were necessarily required to communicate with Elsa, he realised.

"Come _on_ , Jackson," she whined. "It's only for the night."

"Are you drunk?" he asked her as she passed the threshold.

"Not enough," she replied, dropping the case on the carpet.

 

* * *

 

Midnight found her sitting up, leaning against the headboard, with the lamp on her side lit.

"Elsa?" he called, mind cloudy, voice groggy, the inside of his eyelids uncomfortably bright. "What are you even doing? It's the middle of the goddamn night."

He opened his eyes enough to note the notebook leaning on her thighs and the double-ended colouring pencil ( _violet and black, who puts violet and black together?_ ) in her fingers.

"You're _colouring_? You can colour in the morning…or in flight…" He yawned loudly. "Please turn off the light," he finally mumbled.

His brain wouldn't figure out Elsa's expression just then. The words _hurt_ and _exasperated_ registered somewhere. She smiled, very _very_ slowly, and reached out to stroke his hair.

Her gel fingernails were infuriatingly soothing against his scalp. His eyelids were betraying him.

He snapped them open and refused to shut them, letting the air-conditioning dry out his corneas and the cold pierce through. He had to blink several times, but he was almost completely awake.

"Elsa?" He propped himself up on his elbows, her hand slipping away. "What _are_ you doing?"

"Colouring," she replied, her tone as clipped as kitchen shears. "Pull the blanket over your head and go back to sleep."

Jack flipped on to his stomach and groaned. "Can't do that now." He peered at her. "What are you colouring, anyway?"

She sucked in a shallow breath, her neck so thin Jack saw her Adam's apple bobbing. The yellow lamplight reflected off her hair, and her face was glowing, but there were also the dark circles under her eyes and shadows in the hollows of her cheeks. She looked half undead and half ethereal, a fallen angel perhaps, or a merciless goddess.

The goddess's head drooped, and her halo appeared as she blocked the lamplight. "Marshmallow," she whispered, her voice the sound of two stones being rubbed together. "I'm colouring Marshmallow."

Jack had nearly forgotten about her dog. "May I—may I have a look?"

She dropped the pencil beside her and nearly handed the notebook over, but her hand stopped midair, trembling slightly, as if the thin spiral-bound book was too heavy for her to bear. Her fingers slipped from under it, letting it land with a soft _whumph_ on her lap.

"No," she stated flatly. "You may not."

"Okay," Jack whispered. There was that gleam in her eyes again, the one that made them look like painted eggshells. "Can you turn the light off now?"

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on tumblr at bathosbardess!


	4. Part Four: On Blue Eyes, Chainmail and a Bottle of Mints

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This goes from fluff to angst with medical emergencies involved.
> 
> Elsa is pushy, Jack is an unreliable narrator neck deep in denial, and my seventeen year old self had body image issues.
> 
> What a wreck.

* * *

 

 

_'Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes deep to the bone.'_

_Dorothy Parker_

 

* * *

 

 

September caught him in Stockholm.

The theme was something futuristic, because all the models were decked out in silver and gold plating. Jack was starting on a very young model with huge cyan eyes who seemed to be completely encased in white plastic.

"Enjoying yourself?"

Elsa was leaning against his mirror, dressed in a grey skirt and a ruffled pink blouse, her normalcy sticking out like a pock-marked thumb.

Jack stared. "You're not dressed yet."

She looked down herself. "I'm dressed enough," she shrugged. "I'm not walking today."

"Oh." Jack turned back to Eve, who was blinking up at him with confusion and something that took Jack a while to decipher.

_It's respect. God knows why, but that look is respect._

Jack massaged a pale shade of beige into her face. He did it as slowly as he dared, trying to be pointed in his ignorance of Elsa Arryn-Dalla.

Within what felt like twenty seconds, the foundation had blended in well enough to pass off as Eve's own complexion. He took a step back and wondered about what he was supposed to do next. Nobody had provided any of the make-up artists with any sketches or hints or even a meaningful glance.

Elsa coughed loudly, sounding like she was going to spit up her spleen. Jack turned only his head to frown at her from the corner of his eye. _No, you are_ not _distracting me._

"How old are you, kid?" Elsa snapped at Eve.

The girl physically shifted backwards, her eyes widening enough to threaten engulfing her small, delicate features. Strands of dark hair had escaped the plastic mantle over her head, kissing her forehead with the softness of a father.

"Ni—nineteen, miss," she whimpered. Her armour made a soft _clack_ against the back of her chair.

Elsa stalked forward almost predatorily, the lights catching the greys and yellows of her face. One hand with impeccable fingernails and spidery fingers shot out to grab Eve's rounded plastic chin.

Jack nearly whimpered himself as the nails dug into the layer of tinted cream like a spoon dipping into mashed potatoes.

Elsa tilted the face in her hand up, carefully examining the arch where the flesh chin melted into the neck, revealed through a chink in the plastic.

"How long do you plan to stay in this industry, child?" she asked in a voice that was almost gentle.

"I—I don't know, miss," Eve stuttered. "This is only a part-time job. For now."

"I see." Elsa's voice was ivory. "It's a good thing they made you a Stormtrooper then. Can't have them ogling that chicken neck."

Eve gasped, and Jack could almost hear her self-esteem snap in two.

"Cover her face in beige," Elsa ordered, her nails leaving small crescent dents in Eve's buttery facial armour. "Put white on her 'lids, and hope they notice nothing but the eyes." A napkin materialized in her hands. "Not that they'll notice much else, but let's stay on the safe side."

She walked off gracefully in her low pointed pumps, carefully wiping each finger of the wheatish residue, leaving a wake of disdain and peppermint behind her.

 

* * *

 

"You didn't have to be so hard on her," he whispered, watching Eve stalk down the runway in her shiny white glory, each step generating a resounding set of _clack_ s.

"I was doing her a favour," Elsa muttered out of the corner of her mouth, raising her hands to clap along with him, smiling as brightly as the waning moon.

 

* * *

 

"You know what would've been better than those aluminium robotics?" she piped up, stabbing a baby beet with her fork. "Chainmail."

Jack stared at her with a mouthful of pasta. She speared a large, mostly unshredded piece of lettuce alongside the beet and ate it off the fork politely.

Jack had thought 'dinner' meant a fancy restaurant of some sort. Evidently, it had only meant a 24-hour diner-coffeeshop hybrid of a place. It was small, warm, with a light haze of smoke from where a patron sat with a cigarette pressed between his lips, nursing a large tumbler of amber liquid.

"I'm sorry, _chainmail_?" _Are you drunk already?_ There was a half-full vodka near her elbow, but Jack wasn't sure if what little was in her system would make her call him _Jackson_.

But then again, there wasn't much of a _system_ to begin with.

She nodded pertly, and a ghost of a wince fluttered across her face as she swallowed.

She had made him wipe her face down after the show like the other, working models, letting Jack ruin her careful contouring. The diner was only half-lit, and they had taken the booth next to the window displaying the red _Open_ sign; in the waxy yellows and greys and scarlets and golds, she looked like a crone one moment, a blushing maiden the next. Where the reds caught her dark circles they were a deep purple, reminding him of Paris and her meltdown and her turning on the runway in her shimmering blue gown, managing to look powerful, but that power was perverted by little things like the widths of her wrists and the manic coolness in her eyes.

"I've always wanted to walk a Middle Ages sort of theme," she stated, fishing a piece of chicken out of her plate and depositing it in the side plate.

Jack blinked. "Elsa, the Middle Ages were _disgusting_."

Elsa's laugh lines folded back in a near-perfect sneer of contempt. "I'm not suggesting the girls walk after forgoing a bath for a month or two." A baby tomato ruptured under the force of her fork, its gelatinous insides erupting over the pale lettuce.

Jack shook his head, snorting softly. "You're going to have to paint plague marks all over them, anyway."

Her eyes widened as her eyebrows furrowed, the corner of her mouth twisting up, a picture of incredulity. Against her translucent skin, her expression was as funny as it was horrifying, like a mask a child had whipped up in a particularly messy art class.

And there were veins and arteries and lymph nodes under there, and ragged, undernourished muscles, and if he stabbed her right now she would bleed.

" _Jack,_ " she screeched. "The plague was _before_ the Middle Ages."

Jack laughed. "I minored in history, sweetie, the plague was _during_ the Middle Ages."

She frowned, but Jack could almost feel the tendrils of doubt surrounding her aura, settling on her shoulders in a dark cloud. She looked lost; a girl in her twenties who had taken the wrong lane while walking down history, finding herself surrounded by tall walls of academia and books she should have read and books she had conveniently ignored.

She broke eye contact, watching her fork twirl a shred of green, the piece of leaf slipping in and out of the prongs.

Jack felt something heavy weigh down his stomach. _Guilt_. That was ridiculous, there was no reason he should feel _guilty_ about pricking Elsa Arryn-Dalla's bubble. Elsa Arryn-Dalla's bubble was ice and iron; he should be feeling proud.

"Elsa?" he ventured. "Are you—?"

"I don't think the fashion industry would notice," she piped up, and the gleam in her eye was ambitious, manic, excited. Her irises were blue and green and violet and it hurt his head to look at them for too long.

Jack snorted. "The fashion industry can't tell between _futuristic_ and _robot fetish_."

Elsa laughed, a throaty, rumbling roar of thunder that seemed to drown out the forks and glasses and plates clattering in the diner, the hush of his own breathing, the voice inside his head.

"I like you, Jack Frost," she giggled, wiping away a tear. "Where were you all my life?"

_Backstage, prettifying your peers, prettifying you, because all of you had beauty you scrubbed and starved away._

 

* * *

 

She dragged him to her own hotel room this time.

"Of course she has a suite," Jack muttered, mostly to himself. He sat himself gingerly on the edge of the giant bed. "Any reason why you have a king-sized bed?"

"Ask my manager." She was shuffling around the room barefoot, hair escaping her bun, tendrils falling around her face like dead vines. A large trolley-case was lying open on the couch, spilling wisps of cotton and polyester, tumbling down to the floor in a colourful waterfall.

The desk was covered in sheets of paper: newspapers and printed ones, catalogues, leaflets, newsletters, a glossy magazine open to a two-page spread of an advertisement for a watch—and a few sketches of women in red, blue, vibrant orange and violent pink.

Jack wanted nothing more than to take a closer look.

_No, you may not_.

Elsa disappeared inside the wardrobe near the doorway, the door swinging shut behind her. Jack watched her, a little fascinated, a little skeptical.

"Elsa?"

She didn't reply. The wardrobe let out a soft creak.

He launched himself off the bed, reaching the wooden doors in three strides. He knocked twice, sharply, and a bolt of pain reverberated through his knuckles. "Elsa? I know you're in there."

Something clattered to the wardrobe floor; another thing – something bulky – hit a wall. _What the hell._ "Elsa, I'm opening the door."

He wrenched it open, the plywood complaining as loudly as the steel hinges. She was crouching on her knees, scrambling blindly at a corner. In the brown gloom, hair seemed to be glowing.

"What the _hell_ requires you to lock yourself in a closet?" he snapped.

She leaned back, sitting against the wall, sure to have splinters up and down her back. She sat there, frowning, thinking, chewing the inside of her cheek, before looking at him with eyes already half filled with suspicion.

"I can't find my mints," she stated.

Jack sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Do your _mints_ come in a little orange bottle with your name and dosage instructions on the label?"

She tried to shove his left leg. "I'm serious, it's just mints." She got up, dusting her skirt. "And the bottle's pink, and squat-looking."

"Do you need the mints right _now_?"

"Oh, I don't know." She smirked, her features sharpening into something close to terrifying, and oddly striking. "Do you _mind_ my mouth not smelling like mint?"

_I_ hate _it when your mouth—_

Jack's very thought was cut off by her lips colliding violently with his teeth, her thumbnails digging into his cheeks. She smelled like vanilla and melons, and her mouth was alcohol and smoke and lipstick and beets, with traces of ecstasy and moonlight and watercolour, and now she was nibbling at his lower lip, and it _hurt_ , but God knew Jack didn't want relief from it.

She was tugging at handfuls of his hair, forcing a whine of a moan from him, and she was licking the front of teeth now, her tongue grazing the insides of his lips, trying to get him to open his mouth.

_I'm not even kissing you back, lady_.

Her lips were cold and chapped, her tongue felt sour, and her hair was tickling his nose. Behind his eyelids he saw red sunbursts and blue comets and bright yellow flashes of lightning, blinding him while opening his eyes.

She was breathing through her nose ( _why the fuck are you breathing through your nose_ ), the warm air fanning across his face, and _there was still a trace of mint_.

"Els—" he managed to mutter when she pulled back, and he found himself swallowing the rest when she began kissing him up his neck, trailing a line of saliva that cooled immediately in the air conditioning, sending streaks of scarlet warmth down him. He sighed audibly, trying his best not to lose himself in the feeling of her fingernails whispering across his nape.

The other hand was raking down his back, tickling and scratching at the same time. It was only when he felt it slip under his shirt that his brain woke up to realize where this was going.

_Oh, no_.

"Elsa…no," he gritted out, panting, because she had somehow sucked all the air out of his lungs.

She stopped immediately, her lips nudging his earlobe. "I'm sorry?" she whispered, her incredulity sinking into his bones.

" _No_." His hands were on the cruel jutting angles of her pelvic girdle ( _when did they get there_ ), and he steered her to his front. She offered no resistance, just a small exasperated huff of air.

"Why're you so fucking _obstinate_ , Jackson Frost?" she spat. For once, her sapphire eyes were on fire where her dilated pupils hadn't pushed her irises to the boundary. Her lips were damp and a fierce pink, her cheeks were flushed, and she was shaking ever so slightly. The nails on the hand holding the back of his neck dug into the flesh, and this time they were painful in the way _painful_ was supposed to be.

He breathed in, then out. "I don't want to do this right now," he told her slowly, ensuring she didn't miss a word. He slipped a hand into the one dangling uselessly near his hip, his index finger internally thrumming alongside the pulse racing underneath her thin skin. "Not here, not like this."

Her hand slipped down from his shoulder to entwine with his free one. She frowned up at him, half petulant, her eyes losing some of its shine. Her flush was receding rapidly, and Jack noticed just how pale the insides of her eyelids looked.

"Why?" she whispered, barely audible, plainly hurt.

_Because I don't want to be so close to you that I can feel your heartbeat on my skin, my lips and my heart. Because I don't want to know how warm you are despite the frost in your blood. Because there's a twisted part of me that wants you to be a paper doll I can paint at will, with little white tabs so your clothes keep changing, but never letting me know if there's flesh underneath, or wires, or bone._

He pressed a kiss to her forehead. "We're in _Stockholm_ ," he grinned, trying to ignore the ice cracking in her heart. "There's a _disorder_ named after this place."

She snorted softly, closing the distance between them to nuzzle the hollow of his neck. "You're an idiot, Jack Frost."

_I'm only an_ idiot _because I'm so afraid you're one too. Maybe we're all idiots. Maybe that's why we're humans and not computers._ He buried his nose in the green and orange scent of her hair. _Maybe that's why, Elsa Arryn-Dalla, I'm so afraid of your idiocy._

 

* * *

 

Jack woke first, finding Elsa clinging him to him like a barnacle, her small breasts pushing uncomfortably against his ribcage; his own arms were thrown over her almost protectively, and he had hair in his mouth.

When he was entering the bathroom for a shower, Elsa was still searching for her squat pink bottle of mints. Her braid had mostly unraveled during the night, coating the back of her extremely oversized ( _and extremely soft_ ) t-shirt.

"Why are those mints so important, anyway?" he asked. The bathroom had a caustic tang dancing through the air freshener; Elsa had got up some time in the night.

"Would _you_ negotiate with a woman whose mouth stinks of stomach acids and nicotine?" she snapped back at him, lifting the corner of the mattress.

"Well, then," Jack shrugged, "don't make it necessary to pop mints first thing in the morning."

"Easy for you to say," she glowered, looking underneath the bed. " _You_ never missed a job because Ralph Laurent thinks you're not thin enough, or Victoria's Secret thinks you're not full enough, or Chanel wants you to change your hair…"

Shaking his head, Jack locked the bathroom door behind him.

 

* * *

 

When he re-entered the room, toweling his hair and steaming a soapy scent into the air, he almost missed her.

She was lying motionless on the floor next to the couch, her eyes awake, tear tracks glistening down her temples; her face was paler than he had ever seen it before, the colour of mountain snow, and her features were drawn out into a heart-breaking amalgamation of sadness and pain.

Near her feet were spilled a dozen small white tablets, and a short pink bottle lay split open against the wall.

" _Elsa!_ " He was crouching at her side in two long strides, ready to pick her up.

"Jack, _no_ ," she whispered. "No…don't…pick me…up."

Her voice was a swan song, a funeral pyre, a flute playing _Amazing Grace_.

His heart had turned solid; he wasn't even sure if he was alive just then, or just a wraith. Fresh tears were bubbling into the corners of her eyes, detaching themselves before scurrying down to melt into her hair.

"Elsa…" Saying her name made him feel a little less useless, he realized as he wiped away the fresh tears with a touch as soft as one he'd use to handle a baby. "What happened?"

"I…I slipped." There was so much _hurt_ in her voice; it was the chord of a puppy choking, a planet dying, a newborn suffocating. "The mints…they were _right there_ …I didn't notice…stepped on them…"

She looked up at him, her eyes watery, the whites bloodshot, her lower lip trembling. There was _fear_ in them now, streaking across her features like a careless paintbrush, spilling its black and grey and dark blue essence all over her.

"Jack, call…an ambulance."

His own vision had blurred a little, but _he mustn't cry_. "Elsa, what's _wrong_?"

"My back." Her voice was trembling. "Jack…I can't…I can't feel my legs."

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on tumblr at bathosbardess !


	5. Part Five: On Bones, Sisterhood and Bittersweet Endings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so.
> 
> Medical terminology, a lot of it. Please consult Google Baba.
> 
> Mention of pet death again.

* * *

 

 

' _I want to see beauty._

_In the ugly, in the sink, in the daily,_

_in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.'_

_Ann Voskamp_

 

* * *

 

 

The hospital was pale blue and white and lit up in butter yellow, and smelled lime green and grey. The sounds of people moving were stark red in the background.

The coffee in his hand was black, but was really a deep red-brown, no vapours around its rim, and tasted like tepid mineral water.

Jack held out his hand, and upturned the cup, slowly at first, then all at once. The coffee poured out gently, almost as if it didn't have as much water as it did, hitting the tiled floor with the quietest splatter. He watched it splash droplets against his trousers, spreading fingers all over the floor, then receding back into one shapeless blob; it looked alive, as alive as he was, as alive as Elsa probably wasn't, reaching for the furthest corners before drawing back, because its safest place was close to where it had started.

"Mr Frost?"

The woman's accent was thick British, like she had been trained to speak that way, and her own mother tongue was lost in that mess somewhere but sometimes peeked through, in the roundness of her _O_ 's and the drawing out of her _EE_ 's.

"Mr _Frost_."

"What?" He was running on tepid water and coffee powder and worry and fatigue.

"We're moving her into surgery," the doctor told him, her voice gentle, her tone like a kindergarten teacher's. _Anna_. _Anna is a kindergarten teacher_.

Jack nodded. His insides seemed to have frozen somewhere between discovering Elsa on the floor and Dr Ranjan wheeling her into Radiology. There was a scream lodged behind his teeth, and his fingers were shaking ever so slightly. His eyes were dry, from tears and his refusal to shut them, because every time he did the latter he'd see buttercream locks coated in blood.

"Doc?" he croaked; his voice had nearly died. "Will she…she be okay?"

Dr Ranjan folded her lips in, looking at her shoes. "She'll walk," she supplied.

"But?" There was _always_ a 'but'.

_Mrs Frost, your son's okay now, but we're afraid we can't do anything about his hair._

_Mrs Frost, Katie's stable, but we couldn't save her eye._

_Jack, you mother's awake, but she's going to have these attacks all her life._

Shanti Ranjan folded her arms against her chest, tapping her side with Elsa's file. Jack could almost _see_ the words trying to burst out from between her forearms, small red darts that would embed themselves in his flesh and poison his very soul.

Mentally, he gave himself a shake. _Get your shit together._

"She's prepped for surgery," the doctor whispered. "We'll fix her spine. But I'm afraid I can't tell you much more, Mr Frost. You're – you're not family or even an emergency contact. There are…confidentiality issues involved." She looked at him with distressed eyes so deep a brown they were almost black.

Jack scowled. "But –"

"Mr Frost, I understand your anger." She tucked a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear, one of the many escaping her simple braid. "But—Mr Frost, even if she's your partner, this is Elsa Goddamn Arryn-Dalla under _my_ care right now, and I kinda have to tread carefully?"

For a fleeting second, she looked like a fifth-grader who had been assigned leadership of a group project.

Jack blinked once, nodding. She was a doctor, in charge of giving people their lives back, giving _Elsa_ her life back; but at the end of the day, she was still a woman not much older than him, who probably woke up some mornings with her heart racing because she had just dreamed of failure.

For Jack, _failure_ meant using the wrong shade of brown, using _porcelain_ instead of _pearl_ , sending a girl to walk a Gothic theme with cheery yellow adorning her eyes.

For Shanti, _failure_ meant letting a life slip out from under her, being forced to remove an arm she was supposed to heal, moving her forceps a little awry and never giving Elsa her legs back.

"Doc?" Shanti's ochre face acknowledged his voice, even if her eyes didn't. "Just…just do your best, okay?"

Shanti smiled. "Mr Frost, if only there were more people who told me that every day." She glanced at her watch. "Surgery can take anything between three and ten hours, Mr Frost. I suggest you get some rest."

Jack shrugged, turning back to the empty Styrofoam cup in his hand.

"No, really, Mr Frost. Get some rest, and some food while you're at it." Some mischief crept into her voice. "Noting that some of my house-staff are rather… _smitten_ with Miss Arryn-Dalla, I think you'll find the Ortho lounge open to you."

Something buzzed quietly, and Dr Ranjan pulled out her phone. "I have to go scrub in."

Jack listened till the sound of her loafers faded away, and didn't stir an inch.

 

* * *

 

Surgery commenced at seven in the evening. Half an hour later, it was called off.

Dr Ranjan found him sitting exactly where she had left him. His chin resting on his palms, he watched the brown streaks on the floor, left by a hasty sweep by a janitor, shift and swirl and creep about, chocolate, clay, bark and Elsa's lipstick all those months ago in Istanbul.

"Mr Frost, I'm really sorry, but I can't operate on her right now," she stated, sounding for all the world like a lawyer. "There were complications with the anaesthesia."

"Okay."

"You're not to tell anyone I told you there are complications with the anaesthesia."

"Okay."

The tiles before him were smudged, their polish removed in the mopping. In the yellowish-light, they looked a lot like skin.

The doctor shuffled her feet about, nervousness rolling off her like plumes of sulphurous steam. "We…we can't operate on her at all till her sister…signs a few papers."

That caught Jack's attention. "I'm sorry?" A spark of anger leapt to the back of his throat. "What do you mean you _can't operate on her_?"

Dr Ranjan sighed loudly, sinking into the seat on his right, her scrubs wafting the aura of a pharmacy towards him. She took off her cap and fanned herself.

"I wish I could tell you, Jackson," she muttered slowly. "But with a high profile case like this…did you know there's a reporter in the front lobby right now?" She snorted mirthlessly, scorn staining the air under her nostrils. "To me, she's supposed to be only a young woman with a broken back, and I'm just supposed to…" She sighed again, rubbing the heel of her palm into one eye socket.

_You're just supposed to heal her. You're supposed to do whatever you can to_ heal _her, God damn it, not sit here with the useless pile of garbage that is me and wait for Anna to sign a piece of fucking paper._

"Is she going to die?" The words left him unhurried, each one taking a bit of his soul with it; five words, coloured from purple to indigo to deep deep black.

Shanti chewed on the inside of her cheek, the movement haunting on the outside.

"Doc, is she _going to die_?"

Shanti spluttered, frustrated, leaping to her feet. "Fuck this," she growled angrily. "Mr Frost, if we operate on Elsa, she'll probably die, and if we don't, she'll never walk, run, drive or have children. So tell me, Mr Frost, _what am I supposed to do_?"

Jack had experience with doctors. Back home, though, they had all been old, wrinkly or in their forties, pot-bellied men and vulture-like women, professionalism so fixated in their eyes he had often wondered if they could laugh.

Dr Ranjan was probably not even thirty, and she was halfway to a breakdown.

_She's probably held a beating heart in her hands._

"Doc?" He cleared his throat. "Does…does my opinion matter, at all?"

The good doctor smiled, looking up at the ceiling. "Not a single bit, Mr Frost, not a single bit."

 

* * *

 

At eleven in the night, Jack's stomach was swearing at him. _Now I see why you smoke, Elsa._

He sat back, his legs sprawled before him, thinking about Death, and her lively younger sister Life, but that wasn't right, Death should be Life's daughter, right?

_No. Death's older. She's seen worst things, done worse things, because she has aborted babies and refused suicidees and killed mothers at birth. She probably hates Life a lot, because the pesky bitch is always interfering in otherwise perfectly normal dying souls, and Life is always clearing up Death's messes, because all souls have to go somewhere, right?_

His mouth was wooly, his palate was sour. When he moved his head, he saw stars. His world was growing more and more blue, blue like Elsa's dress in Paris and the depths of her dead dead eyes.

"Jack? Are you Jack Frost?"

Behind his eyelids, he smelled raspberries in the woman's voice.

He swung his head forward, regretting immediately as the contents of his seemed to swirl about inside the confines of his skull.

His vision cleared the way to a couple standing to his left. The woman was a tall, slender, strawberry blonde with full flushed cheeks, pale blue-green eyes and a thick smattering of freckles. The man was easily over six feet tall, stockily built, his hair the colour of hay and a scowl embedded into his face.

The woman's face looked remarkably similar to Elsa's.

"Anna?" he muttered.

The woman nodded, biting into her lower lip, brows forming furrows across her forehead. "You _are_ Jack, aren't you? Elsa said you have white hair."

Jack nearly snorted. "The one and only," he said instead. His face ached too much to offer her a smile.

Anna breathed out a resounding " _Oh!_ ", collapsing into the seat next to him. The muscular blond guy took the seat next to her, hulking over his knees to take a better look at Jack.

"This—this is Kristoff," Anna flushed, breathing alarmingly quickly. "We're engaged."

Kristoff only nodded at him. Jack was too tired to care.

"How's Elsa?" The question left Anna in one big landslide, like a balloon releasing air too quickly, laced with worry that choked him.

"Sedated, probably," he shrugged.

"Her—her surgery?"

Jack blinked. "Am I the first person you're talking to here?"

Anna gulped, her mouth drawing into a grimace her sister wouldn't have been caught dead in. "Kristoff said—"

"Hey, big guy." Jack leaned across his legs, looking straight into the blond's brown eyes. "Are you _trying_ to kill your future sister-in-law?"

The man's expression changed from incredulity to anger before jack could blink, and he was already halfway out of his seat when Jack's own words registered to him.

"Kristoff, _no_ ," Anna hissed. The two argued in mumbles furiously for exactly fifteen seconds before Anna shot him down with a determined " _Don't you dare!"_ and that was the end of that.

"We're sorry," Anna sighed. "It's been a long day, and we're both just really worried." She was twisting a length of green ribbon through her fingers. "What happened about Elsa's surgery?"

Jack breathed out, deeply, and his world went black for a fleeting second. "They didn't do it," he reported simply, keeping emotion out. "They need you to sign some papers. I'm not family or _anything_ , so I couldn't."

Anna gasped. "Why?" she nearly wailed. "What's wrong with her, Jack, how did she _break her back_?"

Jack woke up a little as Kristoff wrapped a large arm around his fiancée, nearly swallowing her. "She slipped," he whispered. "She slipped on a bottle of mints. She didn't see it, and she slipped." The word _slipped_ was beginning to lose meaning to him. _Sl-ee-pped. Sahl-ee-pped. Sli-pped._

_Wake the fuck up._

"People don't break their backs by slipping and falling to the floor," Kristoff growled.

"The _carpeted_ floor," Jack added helpfully.

The disbelief in Kristoff's face was staggering. "Mr Frost, if you presume to _mess_ with my fiancée—"

"The only thing I _presume_ right now is that you're hungry, your fiancée has worried herself sick, and I myself really need some coffee," Jack rapped out calmly. "Look, talk to the God damned doctor. Her name's Shanti Ranjan, M.S., and you'll find her in the Ortho lounge, because that lady is _not_ going home tonight, probably _because_ , Mr Kristoff, you and your fiancée aren't the only ones splitting hairs about Elsa."

Kristoff gaped at him like a goldfish in a mud splattered bowl.

Anna was on her feet. "Well, then," she smiled painfully. "Let's find the Ortho lounge."

 

* * *

 

It took Jack a while to get used to the fact that Anna— sweet, caring Anna with her sad smiles and freckles and the glass of water she tried to force feed him when he started swaying— was Elsa's own sister.

_What happened to you, Elsa?_

_'Too fat for Ralph Laurent, not full enough for Victoria's Secret_.'

The Ortho lounge had one couch, three chairs, a bookshelf, a coffee table, and a bulky old-fashioned television set. It was painted pale blue, and the lighting was terrible.

Dr Ranjan gestured them to the leather couch. Jack's aching bottom felt like it was sitting on clouds.

"Miss Arryn-Dalla, before I begin…" Dr Ranjan peered over Elsa's file, her eyebrows motioning to the two men.

"They can stay, Doctor," Anna testified.

"Okay, then." Elsa's file snapped shut like a bear-trap. "Let me start with the fracture. Your sister tripped over a bottle, and this is according to Mr Frost, and fell to the floor. The shock caused some mild trauma, and a large blunt piece of her fractured vertebra is pushing against her spinal cord. That's why her legs are paralysed." The doctor's voice was composed, and her hands didn't shake.

"That doesn't explain shit," Kristoff rumbled.

Shanti perked one eyebrow. "Mr Bjorgman, I can still have you leave the room."

"She fell on a _carpet_ ," Kristoff pointed out incredulously, the doubt in his voice as harsh as the CFL light overhead. _Please shut up_.

Shanti pursed her lips. "I was coming to why we can't operate." She kept Elsa's file gingerly on the coffee table, as if it were made of parchment.

Jack sat up a little.

"Miss Arryn-Dalla, your sister has…"

The doctor's face kept swimming in and out of dark clouds lurking just at the edges around her round face. Jack's whole world seemed to be the list she was rattling off in her gentle, preschool-teacher voice.

_Osteoporosis._

That was the first. _Low bone density. Brittle bones. Susceptible to fracture. Are they more brittle than her emotional range?_

_Anaemia._

_Anorexia._

_Bulimia._

_Ulcer._

_Cirrhosis._

_Early emphysema._

"Wha—what?" Anna's mumble was the spot of pink on a square of black satin.

"Her smoking has damaged her lungs." The doctor swallowed ever so small. "There's a possibility they'll collapse if we need to go in via her rib cage."

"Will—will you—?"

"Need to go in via her rib cage? Highly unlikely."

"Oh." Anna's hands twitched in her lap. _Is she wondering if she should've taken notes_. "Are there any more…complications?"

"Miss Arryn-Dalla, your sister is, to put it simply, _malnourished_."

Anna looked more surprised than terrified. "I'm…I'm sorry?" One hand swept across her face, her tears dissolving what little make-up she had slapped on; streaks of cerise and beige arced across her paper-white features with their freckles like chocolate sprinkles. "She's _malnourished_?"

_'What is she, some third world baby?'_ Jack could've held those words before her mouth and watched them waft towards the good doctor.

"Well, yes," Dr Ranjan shrugged. "She's severely underweight, she's deficient in vitamins A, D and C, and iodine and magnesium and iron, she has barely any fat, brown or white, and her muscles are atrophying to provide her protein needs. I'm honestly surprised all her hair hasn't fallen out yet." Her lips pursed into something akin to annoyance. "There are more, but we're trying to stabilize them as we speak. We have her on IV—"

Anna sobbed. Loudly.

Jack wanted to scream and laugh at the same time.

_And there I was, hoping you really were a doll, so you don't need food or water or minerals or vitamins, because your insides were as plastic as you are, and your heart frozen too solid to pump blood, and you weren't supposed to have BONES, God damn it._

"Will she be okay?" Anna's face was tomato red, her features scrunched, her lips wet and malformed. "Doctor, tell me she's going to be okay."

Dr Ranjan's smile was so sad it hurt Jack's soul. "Miss Arryn-Dalla, every one of her conditions are treatable. The right diet and some medicine, and her body is bound to fix itself." Her chewed fingertips drummed the table-top. "The problem is, they're making her current problem untreatable."

"What are odds?" Kristoff asked, his voices surprisingly gentle as he patted his fiancée's shoulder.

Shanti shrugged. "I'd say about a sixty per cent chance she may not survive."

"Do it," Anna gurgled. "Give me the papers. I can't…I can't let her live…"

_You can't let her live legless knowing you'd taken away her chance to walk again, however bleak the chance may have been._

The doctor nodded, pulling a few documents out of the file. "Please sign these. We'll start the surgery at five tomorrow morning."

 

* * *

 

Elsa was lying on the floor, her wide blue eyes leaking tears into the halo her hair formed around her head.

Her face was _skeletal:_ her eyes deep in their sockets, her skin flimsy, her lips thin and drawn back, revealing her teeth in an obscene grin.

_"Jack."_ Her voice was a death-rattle, air being forced out of shreds of her throat. " _Jack…"_

" _Elsa!"_ His own voice echoed around the room. _"What happened?"_

Her tears were red and brown and made his stomach recoil. " _I'm dying,"_ she whispered. " _Jack, I can't…I can't feel my legs."_

Jack looked at her legs, only there was nothing waist-down, just shreds of muscle and a tangle of blood vessels and blood, _so much blood_ , crawling around her, creeping up her t-shirt, absorbing into her hair. She opened her mouth in a sob, and a river of blood and pus and vomit fell out, and the carpet soaked it all in.

" _Jack."_ Even as he watched, her hair slid off her head like Rapunzel's had, a lifetime ago in Paris, and her scalp was covered in dark blue and black bruises – no, _sores,_ weeping necrotic sores, spewing a vile black liquid.

"Rubbish." Jack looked up to where the voice seemed to be coming from. The ceiling was gone, and there were only flat round lights with waxy yellow coronas.

"Who's that?" he called, and his voice was barely above a squeak. _Is that you, God?_

"Rubbish," the voice reiterated. It was Shanti, the jolt in his stomach told him. "Elsa doesn't have _bubonic plague_ , Mr Frost, what isupwithyour—"

And it was gone.

Jack looked down again to Elsa, only now there was a skeleton on a pool of starlight, with two large blue eyes looking right into the small black box at the bottom of his heart.

_Shove over, Jack._

A million small hands converged on Elsa's remains and two slipped over his eyes. His world went from pale buttercup to the darkest night to a garishly bright blood orange.

He peered up at a dusty looking CFL bulb.

"Let him sleep, Kristoff." Anna's mumbling swam in and out of his audio focus.

"I'm awake," Jack announced, the syllables tripping over each other in their hurry to escape his mouth.

"Excellent." Kristoff grabbed his ankles and moved them to the floor, ignoring Jack's surprised yelp. "It's four in the morning, just by the way."

Jack rubbed his eyes vigorously. "Are they prepping her for surgery?"

"I guess," Kristoff shrugged. He stood up and walked to one of the chairs.

"Kristoff, just…sit in one place." Anna's voice was a note above a whisper, her eyes puffy and her nose red. "Are you okay, Jack? The doctor said you're a little dehydrated."

"Probably am." His mouth had a sour smell. "Could you…please, pass me a glass of water."

Anna gave him the Styrofoam glass and sat down next to him. She watched him with wide, expectant eyes as he gulped down bitter strands of mineral water, her hands fidgeting without pause.

"Elsa really likes you," she blurted quickly.

Some water bypassed into Jack's nose. He snorted once, twice, then felt his sinuses clear. Something bitter crept down and onto his tongue.

"I'm a little aware of that, ma'am," he muttered. _I'm aware of what your sister's mouth tastes like, ma'am_.

Anna wrung her hands. "I mean, she's honestly halfway in love with you." Her words tumbled out of her like a group of screaming toddlers, tripping and falling and getting up and brushing themselves off. "She texted me, or called me, and she'd always be, like, ' _the make-up guy was here',_ then it was ' _Jack let me sleep in his room'_ then ' _Jack has the most beautiful white hair oh em jee',_ then there was a week when—" Anna stopped herself, and cringed. "I should shut up now."

"Yeah, you should." Jack's ears were burning. _Jack has the most beautiful white hair, OMG._

"Can this…stay between us?" Anna requested, looking like a thirteen-year-old. "I don't think I was supposed to tell."

Jack nodded. "No one gets to know anything."

_Jack has the most beautiful white hair, OMG._

There was a scar running obliquely from her forehead into her hairline, faint enough to almost melt into her skin. She caught him looking at it, and touched it gently with painted green fingers.

"It was an accident," she whispered, her smile wide but teary. "Elsa and I were playing in the snow, and she pushed me a little too hard." The hand dropped, defeated. "Papa gave her a pretty hard time about it, because it bled so badly I actually lost a few memories. She refused to play with me ever again."

Jack patted her hand shyly. "I'm sure she only did it for your safety."

Anna's laugh was one of despair. "She shut me out completely. Threw herself into her schoolwork and art. She was the lead costume designer for every play our school put up for four years in high school." Her sad smile transmuted to pride. "She made the one I wore as Juliet when I was fifteen. The school kept it, said they want to use it in all future productions."

_I've always wanted to walk a Middle Ages sort of theme._

"Has she shown you any of her designs?" Anna enquired.

"Not really," Jack admitted. "I caught her drawing once, and she got shy really fast."

"That's Elsa." Anna giggled. "She didn't even let her own minions look at the stuff she had personally designed until they were finished."

Jack laughed at her choice of words. For a cheating second, he was back in Burgess.

Kristoff, drooping in his chair, groaned in his sleep, a rumble that would've shaken the floor. Jack stared. "Does he do that often?"

"All the time." Anna rolled her eyes. "He's a little rough around the edges, but he's actually a real softy."

"I can totally tell," Jack deadpanned.

Anna punched his shoulder, albeit tiredly. "I see why Els is so nuts about you," she smirked. "You're exactly like her."

Jack's heart froze. "I am _not_."

Anna only grinned.

"I am _not_ ," Jack repeated under his breath, looking at his hands. There was some skin peeling off from his palm. "I am _not_."

"Jack, you're acting like one of my students." Anna's smirk was permeating every word.

"Tell me about Marshmallow." He wasn't like Elsa, he _wasn't_ , he _wasn't_. _I_ do _sound like a five-year-old._

"Our dog? Elsa told you about our dog?"

_Elsa had a fucking meltdown about your dog._

Anna shrugged. "Marshmallow was just this huge white mongrel Elsa found as a puppy in her last year in school. He was a good dog, an excellent guard dog, as a matter of fact, and he had a queer fascination with sparkly stuff. That's it, really." She was getting back into her hole of misery. "He didn't get along with our cat, Olaf, at _all_ , and now he's gone Olaf's all depressed."

_How does one tell if a_ cat _is dep—_

The lounge door opened. A small nurse with curly brown hair looked around the doorway. "Doctor R asked me to tell you Elsa Arryn-Dalla has been moved into surgery," she squeaked.

The atmosphere in the lounge went dark green from wheat yellow rapidly.

Anna deflated visibly, her shoulders shaking. Jack's fingers started shaking again.

Kristoff snored.

 

* * *

 

Doctor R entered the lounge still in her scrubs at nine in the morning, smelling of antibiotics, plastic, disinfectant, and blood.

"It was easier than I thought," she sighed. There was dried blood on her wrists. "She'll walk."

Jack's world turned cerulean.

Anna sobbed and laughed into Kristoff's gigantic chest.

"Hey, doc," Jack called before the green of Shanti's scrubs disappeared from view. "What's the _but_?"

Shanti's sigh shook her entire frame. "We'll see about that after, Mr Frost."

 

* * *

 

Elsa was white in her hospital robes, tubes surrounding her like she was the queen of her court of plastic tubes.

Jack gave himself a mental shake.

There were tubes in both nostrils, both elbows, one out from her knuckles, one out from between her legs, all carrying some liquid in or out of her. _All sure to leave a scar of some form_.

"How is she?" Anna whispered, afraid to wake her sister up.

Shanti shrugged. "High as a kite, probably," she all but yelled. "She's sedated _and_ on morphine."

She checked her watch, eyes subtly following the second hand. "She'll be waking up over the next half hour. You can stay here; I'm going to go eat."

Anna dragged a chair to Elsa's bedside, sat down and sprawled over the latter's midriff. Then she sobbed afresh, heaves and hiccups and wrecking cries and little groans, all bubbling through a shield of saltwater.

Kristoff was at her side in a second, wrapping his arms all the way around her shoulders, engulfing her entirely, his jaw set against his own second-hand tears.

Jack leaned against the door, watching only Elsa's chest moving up and down under one of Anna's freckled hands, and his background score was the _pip-pip-pip_ of her cardiac monitor.

And he felt his world shift into baby blues and sapphires and pastel champagne, cerise and cherry blossom and lilac, buttercups and sunshine and the pale green of mint.

 

* * *

 

Forty five minutes. It took Elsa forty five minutes to wake up.

Her eyes blinked six and a half times. She sucked in a lot of air and breathed it out. Her irises swept in a downward arc towards her sister.

"Ah—Anna?"

Anna stopped breathing. Jack could hear her heart stitching itself back into place.

The younger threw herself around the elder, always gentle, always loving, resting her cheek against the platinum blonde hair someone had carefully woven into a plait.

Elsa raised two drowsy arms to wrap around her baby sister's midriff, smiling like a child, her mouth wide and welcoming and dripping relief.

She peered from under Anna's arm, catching his eye. Her smile widened, and she looked half drunk and half in heaven.

"Well, if it isn't Old Man Winter," she mumbled, her words slurring but dripping snark nonetheless.

Jack laughed, allowing one tear to run down his cheeks, then another. He walked to her, with the plastic in her nose and morphine in her bloodstream, and held her cheeks as he pressed his lips to her forehead.

He held her face as he pressed his forehead to hers, one damp and the other cold, and as she kissed his nose and called him _Jackson_ and he felt her heart cracking, then snapping, and then the ice was tears.

* * *

"She'll be gaining weight." Dr Parr was a middle-aged nutritionist with a no-nonsense snap to her voice. "She's going to be on carbs and a lot of proteins, alongside all the fresh edible vegetation she can get her hands on."

"She'll also have to exercise," Dr Ranjan added. "But only to keep the excess burned. And not before her physiotherapy's over."

Anna nodded, her pencil scratching its way down a newly purchased spiral notebook. "When does the brace come off?"

"No less than six weeks," Shanti supplied. "I'll be referring her to one of my colleagues in Norway; he'll decide the exact time span according to any developments that may come up."

"Ri-ght." Anna's tongue peeked out from the corner of her mouth.

"I'd prefer if she took a break from work, even after she's recovered," Dr Parr nodded. "I'm not from Psych, but I think a little less stress on being perfect will help with the eating disorders."

_Well, Elsa, looks like it took you a broken back to stop being a human coat-hanger._

"That'll be a tragedy to no one but teenage boys across the world, I'm sure," Shanti muttered darkly.

Anna chewed on the inside of her cheek. "That's kind of up to Elsa, isn't it?"

"Of course it is." Dr Parr smiled. "She's only twenty four, she has her life ahead of her, if she doesn't smoke, starve or drink it away."

Anna looked up at the silent Jack, her pale eyes quivering. "Maybe, yeah."

Jack shrugged. _I don't really like that look, lady._

 

* * *

 

"We're taking a jet to Arendal."

Anna's announcement echoed in the empty corridor.

Jack nodded, smirking. "Her manager's got a thing for going all the way."

"Will you come with us?"

Jack opened his mouth to answer, but it caught in his throat. For a blink, Anna was Katie, and time had stopped.

He patted her shoulder. "I would love to, but I still have a job to do."

Anna's face fell. In his sleepy mind, it was melting off. "Oh. It's okay."

"Thank you."

The silence was heavy on his lungs.

"She never wants to model ever again," Anna whispered. "She says she wants to go to college."

Jack smiled. "That's a good decision."

"You think so?"

Jack shrugged. "Modeling nearly killed her. Shit like English don't usually tend to do that."

"She might take up art."

"That's excellent."

Silence again; the silence of ruined expectations.

"They're prepping her for a journey." Anna took his hand. "Come on, she'll want to see you."

Elsa was in a wheelchair, her back held ramrod straight by an ugly steel contraption that wrapped around her head. She looked hopefully at him, then Anna.

"Are you coming to see the town where this cyborg grew up?" she piped.

Jack shook his head. "I have work. Tooth's going to be furious."

Elsa's mouth twisted. "You're going to stay in that world?"

He knelt to kiss her cheek. "If I'm in Oslo anytime, I'll come visit."

She grabbed his hand, the plastic tubing pressing into his skin. "Do you promise?" Her voice was a hush. "Do you promise to come visit?"

Jack laughed, pressing his mouth to her fingers. "Don't worry, Elsa," he smiled. "If I'm in Oslo, I'll surely come visit."

He never did.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do you know how difficult it is to find a Disney character of South Asian origin
> 
> i had to settle for a secondary character from a direct to video sequel, christ
> 
> anyway there's an epilogue.


	6. Epilogue: On Home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the fluffy happy ending I had been rooting for when I'd started writing this yay.

* * *

 

 

The July after what he referred to as the Stockholm Fiasco found him back home in Burgess.

Come autumn, his identity card would read _Jackson Frost, Staff._ He was going to teach art in his small town, and he'd be painting walls in his free time.

Home had caught him unawares when the sign outside his mother's shop read _Frost's Frostings and Art Supplies,_ instead of the simple, fuss- and pun-free _Frost's Art Supplies_.

His mother had found herself with far too much free time after Katie had left. She replaced her mothering with baking, and now the shop sold cupcakes alongside rows of watercolour tubes.

Presently, he was half-hanging off the drawing room couch, caught in the line of the air conditioning vent. The background was the buzz of the ceiling fan and the chattering of an over-zealous talk show host on the television screen. Outside, children trampled lawns and hopped over sidewalks and bushes and through trees, because all children seemed to possess some secret store of mystical self-cooling property.

"Jack?" Katie dropped something on his rib cage. It stung. "Call for you."

Jack scrambled for the wireless phone before it slipped into the seam. "Hello?"

"Is this Jackson Frost, the complete asshole who left me for a position in a _high school_?"

Jack grinned to himself, turning himself onto his back. Katie bent over the back of the sofa, the eyebrow over her good eye raised. Not that he could tell what the other eyebrow was doing; Katie always brushed her bangs over the eye a sudden retinal clot had ruined for her. "Hi there, Tooth. Where are you?"

"I believe the question starts with a _how_." Even over the static, he could see Toothiana smiling, a golden lock falling on her forehead. "I'm in Sydney, clunkhead. You would have been here, if you didn't run off to teach a bunch of hormonal teenagers the complexities of perspectives."

"Love you too, Tooth."

Toothiana snorted, a rush of static rubbing against his ear drum. "I didn't call you complain, though. Arryn-Dalla mailed me, because _someone_ couldn't be bothered to share his e-mail ID."

"Which one?" Jack yawned. His Adam's apple was almost in his mouth.

"How many do you know?"

"Two, so far. Unless one just had a baby."

Toothiana could be heard breathing in, then out. In, then out, again. "The blonde one."

"Strawberry or platinum?"

" _God damn it,_ Jack. Elsa. Elsa mailed me." Toothiana's exasperation ceased to be amusing. "Apparently, you couldn't be bothered to visit your own girlfriend. She says she'll be in the States by late August. So watch your arse, you bugger."

"She's not my girlfriend," Jack sighed. Above him, Katie covered a giggle with her hand. "And I don't really care anymore."

"You're an idiot, Jack Frost." And Toothiana was gone.

 

* * *

 

"Mum, I'm going to need some pencils…"

His mother was at the counter, and she was talking to a tall, slender woman with her platinum blonde hair in a bun and garbed in pale pink, holding a half-eaten lemonade cupcake.

Both women turned to him when he entered, and Jack looked only at the younger one. Elsa's eyes were wide, still sapphire, and sparkling with the remnants of some jape his mother had just shared.

Her cheekbones were still prominent, but her cheeks had no hollows, and the apples were flushed. Her arms flattened where they rested against the lace overlay of her blouse, because they were flesh now, and she was flesh and blood and standing before him, and there was frosting on the tip of her nose.

From somewhere near her heart, he heard the sharp _crack_ of blood freezing over.

The bell over the door and his mother's breathing were his background score now, and the _pip-pip-pip_ echoed in his memory.

"But," he blurted, "you _hate_ icing."

She frowned, which melted into a wide smile, and her eyes had tears from where her heart had thawed. The air was the golden brown of the fall outside

"I do," she said, and her voice was rich and throaty. "But your mother's is amazing."

His mother uttered a soft _oh_ before slinking away almost craftily.

"You're in the college here?" The art college was half a mile out of town.

She nodded. "I'm studying Fashion Tech. This was the only place who'd, you know…"

She looked at her shoes, a pair in comfortable white leather. Her ankles were still skinny.

"Well, you're a celebrity," he smirked. "And this is a small town."

She snorted. "Shut up."

He dropped his bundle of homework on the counter. "Y'know, when Tooth told me you're in the States, I expected you in, I dunno, New York or something." He smiled wider, so wide his mouth hurt. "If you weren't so surprised to see me, I'd say you _followed_ me here."

She looked like she was going to hurl her cupcake at him mid-laugh. She was beautiful, ice encased in roses, and she was just a pretty lady who'd walked into a cupcake shop and a former goddess who had fallen to humanity.

"You're an idiot, Jack Frost," she grinned, and the hand moving hair out of her face had scarless knuckles.

_An idiot who thawed your heart_.

This time, he did feel proud.

 

* * *

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on tumblr at bathosbardess.tumblr.com !

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote it when I was 17 and struggling with an eating disorder, and this mess was a result of it and I am inordinately fond of it.
> 
> Find me on tumblr at bathosbardess !


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